I had been wanting to change the player effects for a while. I saw Doctor Strange (movie) over the weekend and it gave me a much better idea of what I wanted to see

I kind of want fractalish design - but that won't work because that's over my current knowledge and time constraints. SO, I make it more like refraction through some sort of crystal, where parts of the world have repeated and flipped components, almost like a kaleisoscope. That makes it a Unity Grabpass material since I'm short on time and don't want to expose the scene render buffer.

notes

The first step for that crystal is to generate the faucets for it. I wanted a hexagonal triangle pattern that would repeat. To do this, I started with squares created from world coordinates (more on that later) that have a unique integer XY id. From the squares, I offset either the top or the bottom of the row by the local Y (see notes above) to get paralellograms that alternate their slant each row. The parararajellograms can be easily split diagonally into triangles, which results in the following:

Whoopsie, it's clamped. Levels in phased often go into the negative in the coordinate system. So, after fighting with the signs and ints and uints for a few minutes, finally got what I wanted:

triangles! everywhere!

the color in those two images is a debug color. it's filled in with something like the following:

It's not used in the final result but it has a large enough range of colors (27 I think?) to easily distinguish the full pattern. 9/10 would recommend

The geoTriangles (and geoSquares and geoParrelelelelograms) take in world coordinates. Because it's a grabpass using material, it would have probably been easier to make it screen coordinares and keep everything consistent in that manner - but that is a disaster gameplay-wise. Some of the previous effects have been very jarring because they don't stay constant with the world. That was a big big motivation here: a glitch effect that looks like a part of the world rather than another post process. I dont have a gif for it but the end result is that I can shake the renderer like shakira, and colored triangles stay in their places

For the actual kaleidoscope effect, the idea is super simple: we sometimes mirror coordinates. For each 4x4 group of triangles, toggle between flipped X and flipped Y based on the XY shape ids. Flipping the X and Y is done around the triangle's world X and Y position. The code for it is something like this:

Flipping around the world X and Y position means that I'm no longer working in surface coordinates for the screen texture, but world coordinates. Before sampling the grabpass scene, I have to move the world coordinates, flipping and all, back into surface coordinates. The extra work is super-ultra worth it because it keeps the effect very stable even as the camera does its wierd nonsense.

kaleidoscope!

At this point I opened a bottle of sake and combined with 4 hours of sleep it turns out I forgot to record what I was doing. In short, I added two more aspects: a random world offset by triangle ID, and a glittering effect that is simply specular lighting with normals generated by the triangle ID. You can sort of make out the glitter here:

It came out to about 110 lines of fairly readable shader code that I immediately pulled out and threw into a CGINC file.

Quick note that I havent optimized anything. Shaders with this stuff are averaging between 70 and 100 instructions still, so it's very slow. All in all, to this stage took me about four hours - 80% of my night

lunch is ending for me now, surely will keep writing about other effects another time

At our demo this weekend, we found that players seem to forget or have issues remembered how to use the powers. We don't really make an effort to teach them, so we've started to change that.

We're first trying out drop-in tutorials: player gets an ability and is dropped into a small tutorial area. I personally want the transition to be as seamless as possible to make it feel as less as a handholdy tutorial as possible.

I spent last night learning Unity's new-ish scene management system, and got a simple prototype for the idea working. Player gets power, game starts to load the tutorial. Soon player is teleported to the tutorial. The player gets to the end and teleports back - which is just re-enabling the scene (it's never unloaded, so the tutorial realm could end up interacting with the real realm at one point).

Spent some time on visuals, using the collection of shader code made in the earlier post.

There are two new shaders for this: the overlay for the world that distorts it, and the glowing platforms. Not entire sure if I like how the platforms look when the player isn't nearby - though that may be because of the visually disruptive screen distortion.

I love the distortion effect on that wired-fence like object. Or platform.

The distorted nature looks spectacular!

Thank you!

I'm pretty exhausted at the moment, so I'm not going to go into too much detail.

Source:

To summarize:* Transition effect added* Increased FoV of the player area slightly* Cyan radial gradient added, centered around tutorial area exit* Found some neato SFX and added them, with the best chords centered around tutorial area exit

Long time no update, but that's because we've been hard at work on something very special; our own custom lighting solution designed specifically for Phased.

Here we can see the system in action:

For the programmers amongst us who want to know the technical details, this is achieved by carefully placing a triangular sprite that has a nice daffodil yellow hue. This technology offers the flexibility to finely craft lighting based on our needs. Through the power of Unity™ we can even use rotations for some avant-garde results:

Unfortunately this is the very opposite of "aesthetically pleasing" so we had to roll it back. As they say in gamedev: iteration is key.

Coming back to the first screenshot, you'll notice some clipping with the stairs. This makes it look like the concrete stairs are absorbing the light into itself in order to become a higher form of stairs. Whilst an interesting result, we didn't want the player to encounter light-imbued stairs until later in the game, so we devised a solution to perk in its powers early-game:

Here you can see we cancel out the light using a custom light-absorbing sprite. We can't use too many of these due to risk of black holes, but one or two should be fine. This gives us the results we want:

Tune in next time to find out how we used duct tape to hold together our editor tools.

I really like the kaleidoscope effect. Is there a glitch mechanic that acts spatially? I really like the idea of it playing into puzzles.

For your street lights, is there a way you could put the light between the ground and the background? Right now it's not cutting out along the steps (which i'll admit I didn't notice until you explained the light blocking rectangle). The art is look really quality so far.

This game is looking amazing!Just saw it on a video from "Get Indie Gaming" on youtube and found this devlog! Congrats on the great work you've done so far, I can't wait to play it!

thanks

here's some more recent junk (been on twitter and junk)

as you can see to get around the triangle lighting solution we decided to port a deferred renderer that uses this unheard of technique called "stencil shadows" to generate pixel-perfect lighting to automate the process of the "shadow rectangle" that we previously thought was very smart but we were told was dumb